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Evolutionary Theorizing: Only Atheists Need Apply
December 7, 2003
Simon Conway Morris is a thorough-going evolutionist and anticreationist. You would think that would make the editors of Science happy, but on Dec. 5 they printed a scathing review by Douglas E. Irwin1 of his recent book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Though Morris accepts the full story of Darwinian common ancestry, […]
New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists
December 5, 2003
A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers. Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years, evolution has dished […]
Intracellular Railroad Has Park-and-Ride System
December 4, 2003
Cells are like miniaturized cities, with elaborate transportation systems ferrying their cargo to and fro (see Feb. 25 headline). Just like a city may have railroads, busses, cars and monorails, the cell has multiple kinds of transport motors: dyneins, kinesins, and myosins. Scientists have learned that most of the roadways are like one-way monorails: actin […]
If a Meteor Roasted the Dinosaurs, Wheres the Charcoal?
December 4, 2003
A majority of scientists continue to believe that a falling asteroid felled the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but problems remain. London geologists went looking for evidence of charcoal at the Cretaceous-Tertiary layers, when the assumed impact occurred, assuming that the force of impact would have ignited a worldwide conflagration (thus the extinction of the […]
Got That? The Complex Story of African Mammal Evolution
December 3, 2003
The article by Jean-Jacques Jaeger in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1 is pretty upbeat about the evolutionary history of African mammals, but takes a bit of untangling to follow. He begins confidently, “For some 40 million years, the Afro-Arabian landmass existed in splendid isolation. A newly described fossil fauna from the end […]
Fossil Fingers Fuddle Phylogeny
December 3, 2003
Another fossil complicates the evolutionists’ picture of tetrapod origins (see Aug 9 headline). Chinese paleontologists have reported1 a new marine reptile from Triassic strata (242 million years old, more or less). Unexpectedly, it has extra digits (a condition called polydactyly) just like the putative ancestors of tetrapods from the earlier Devonian strata (370-354 million years […]
Adaptive Radiation: A Darwinian Mechanism Inherits the Wind
December 3, 2003
Another Darwinian assumption needs to be re-examined. Adaptive radiation, the belief that a species isolated on an island will diverge into many species, has been hit by a hurricane. Calsbeek and Smith, writing in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, studied lizards on the Bahamas after Hurricane Floyd devastated the islands. “Islands are […]
Editorial: The Cult of the Prize
December 3, 2003
In a letter to the editor in the Dec. 4 issue of Nature1, historian Robert Marc Friedman (U. of Oslo) asks, “Is science losing out in the race for recognition?” The race for honors, he feels, is diminishing science: Raymond Damadian’s public dispute (see “Physician launches public protest over medical Nobel” Nature 425, 648; 2003) […]
Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered
December 2, 2003
A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News. It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together. To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]
Vega Has a Neptune?
December 1, 2003
The BBC News and EurekAlert are pretty excited about a discovery at Vega, the sapphire-blue star that hangs overhead in summertime (from the Northern Hemisphere; Aussies see it at the horizon). Astronomers think they see a clump of material that might be at the distance from the star similar to Neptune’s distance from the sun. […]
Judge Rules ID Unconstitutional
December 20, 2002
Judge John E. Jones III gave his ruling on the Dover school board case in favor of the plaintiffs, as expected. His wording against the board was strident, even accusing them of lying about their religious motives for including intelligent design (ID) as an alternative to evolution. He spoke of the “breathtaking inanity” of the […]
Why Workouts Work for Humans, Not Pickups
December 20, 2002
Space Daily began an article on space medicine with a thought-provoking comparison: Most machines don’t improve with use. Old pickup trucks don’t gradually become Ferraris just by driving them fast, and a pocket calculator won’t change into a supercomputer by crunching lots of numbers. The human body is different. As weightlifters know, the more that […]
Wet-Marsers Win, But Life Unlikely
December 20, 2002
The discovery of evidence for past water on Mars made Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year.1 Most recently, the Spirit rover found goethite, an iron oxide that forms most readily in water, announced a JPL press release Dec. 13. Although Richard A. Kerr at Science feels this second discovery on the opposite side of Mars […]
Human-Ape Gap Quadruples
December 20, 2002
Remember that old truism that humans and chimpanzees share 98.5% of their genes? Try 94% instead. That’s a new estimate by Matthew Hahn (Indiana U) and a team who published in a new online journal, PLoS One.1 J.R. Minkel, writing for Scientific American, said “The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited […]
Evolution As Assumption
December 20, 2002
51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]
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